Adonis

He steps out of myth already luminous. The Greek figure Adonis was the beautiful mortal beloved by Aphrodite — his death from a boar's tusk turned the anemone red — and the name has meant a kind of impossible physical beauty ever since, borrowed by Renaissance painters and Romantic poets whenever they needed a word beyond handsome. In American naming it arrived relatively recently, entering the charts in the early 2000s as parents became more willing to reach into mythology for something with genuine weight.

No living Adonis has yet accumulated enough cultural mass to redirect the name's meaning — it still lives primarily in the myth and in the Creed film franchise, where Adonis Creed carries it with convincing authority. Currently sitting at rank 206, it has been climbing steadily for two decades, favored by families who want something classical that hasn't been flattened by overuse.

Three syllables — A-do-nis — with the stress in the middle, the name spreading its weight evenly before the crisp s closes it. As siblings, Abraham, Timothy, Emmanuel, or Nicolas give it a classical, intentional row. The boy who grows up Adonis carries a name that precedes him into every room, which tends to produce one of two outcomes: someone who works twice as hard to seem ordinary, or someone who has made peace with not being.